Intuition: The Golden Gift

WORKING WITH OTHERS

“Intuition is one of a healer’s greatest assets. the ability to listen to and hear your inner guidance, to sense or see images in your mind or to be guided by an inner knowing is a very special gift. At times you may be guided to say or do things that seem strange to the logical mind. When used appropriately, this guidance gives you the opportunity to leap beyond the normal senses and gain insights in a way that could very easily lead to a breakthrough in a person’s healing process. Intuition goes far beyond book knowledge; it comes from your own deep inner knowing, not from your thinking.

Inner guidance may come in the form of a feeling, a picture or a voice. Meditation, or any practice that helps to quiet down the mental chatter and clear stray thoughts from the mind, will assist you in hearing and feeling this intuitive guidance when it comes. Asking and praying for inner guidance to become an active party of your life and to assist in your healing and the healing of others can greatly accelerate the process of opening up. Regardless of your current skill level, trust that your ability is indeed developing and allow time for this gift to grow. The more you use it, the faster it will develop.

My intuition-my inner guidance- is accessed when I mentally and emotionally disengage, take a few deep breaths, relax, quiet my mind and go inside to ask “What is really going on here? How can I help this person? What am I to do or say?” Many times when I am very relaxed and actively listening to a person, an image or impression will come to me; other times I will hear words. Some people I know smell fragrances or see colors. In most cases, the guidance received will be the key to unlocking the challenge.

Often when assisting someone I will get the impression of a parent or an earlier age in the person’s life. When asked, “What happened between you and you(father/ mother)?” “What do you want to say to your (father/mother)?” or “What happened when you were (age)?” The person will frequently burst into tears. The remembering of a past event and the completion of it releases the blocked energy,thereby facilitating the healing process.

In 1986 I met a man in Skagway, Alaska who was experiencing a recurring pain in his foot. He explained that he could not remember injuring his foot, however he was aware that it had not bothers him prior to his moving near the ocean.

As I listened I relaxed and in my mind clearly saw the inside of the bow of a small wooden boat with a coil of rope on the floor. As I watched I asked myself what this meant and although I did not get a picture immediately, I sensed that this person, in what appeared to be a past lifetime, was a fisherman who had been standing near the bow. Somehow his foot had become entangled in the rope and he was either hurt or dragged overboard and drowned. After sharing my insight and doing an aura cleansing the pain went away and to the best of my knowledge never returned. The amazing part for me was that this discussion and the insight happened while I was driving on a winding narrow road.

When learning to access your intuition make sure you ask the person you are working with for permission to share what you are receiving. After communication your insight always ask if what you have shared has any meaning for them. In all cases, make sure to approach this by asking questions rather than making statements. This will allow the person to go inside and check their own feelings. Most people will register a “true” response by some type of physical or emotional reaction in their body—a tightness in the pit of the stomach, a muscle jerk or goosebumps on the skin. Regardless of the reaction from the person you are working with, remember how and what you are intuitively receiving, so that over time you can observe the accuracy of your impressions. You may even wish to keep a journal of these intuitive insights.

The best healers are guided from within. It takes a willingness to practice and accept honest feedback in order to learn to listen and to trust the information you are receiving intuitively.”

Excerpted from The Healing Energy of Your Hands: Michael Bradford

COMMENTS FROM REIKI RETREAT:
The more you work with Reiki, the more you will find that you are receiving inner guidance or intuitive information/insights while working with yourself or with others. Some of the things I have found helpful to activate this process are summarized below:

1. Intuition is not a special gift for a selected group of people. It is a gift we are all given as part of our birthright. Some choose to open the gift and work with it, others choose to put it on a shelf and forget about it, others may be apprehensive about opening it, allowing it to stay under wraps until a later time…Think about this analogy and how it may apply to you…

2. Accessing the ability to receive intuitive information is easier than we think, and is already in use in our day to day lives. We may not give it credit when we have used this information, simply because it may have come to us in very ordinary circumstances, rather than appearing with all the bells and whistles.

Now just think about it…have you ever planned on going some place and then suddenly had a change of mind for no apparent reason, or decided to change the direction or route you were taking? Only to have discovered later on how fortunate you were to have missed an accident or a traffic jam. We will never know how many people were using intuitive guidance on Sept 11 when the Twin Towers were struck, and they had decided for some reason not to be there when they normally would have been.

How many times during your life have you had a creative idea, an inspiration or solution to a problem that appeared out of nowhere? We all have encountered this experience, which is intuition at work.

Have you ever had what feels like a gut reaction about something or someone in relation to one of your children? This again is intuition.

Want to take a nap and wake up in an hour but don’t have an alarm clock around? Just state before nodding off, I want to wake up in X amount of minutes. The message is relayed to the subconscious, which will wake you up at the designated time.

Have you ever found yourself saying, I had an epiphany today! or maybe you heard someone else say it…this is a direct result of inner guidance or intuition at work.

Any time you say, I can’t explain it, I just have this feeling about…. you are expressing yourself intuitively.

The next time you start to say “I don’t have intuitive ability.” stop and take a moment to examine some ordinary happenings in your life and you may be surprised to find that you are to the contrary, more intuitive than you give yourself credit for.

3. When thinking about those examples mentioned above and remembering yourself in similar situations, try to recall exactly what state of being you were in when it happened.

If you recalled having a creative idea or inspiration, what were you doing? Were you stressed out or more relaxed? Were you engaged in an activity that required your full concentration, or were you in a comfortable, calm atmosphere?

Generally, when a person is in a more relaxed state of being, when the logical, chattering side of the mind grows quieter, this opens the gateway for communication with the subconscious, which allows intuition to be recognized and heard. If you are one who describes yourself as not able to turn off the mental chatter—try this: be a detached observer, listen without attachment to the talk. I like to describe it as if I were sitting in front of a TV watching CNN, just watching the tag lines at the bottom of the screen go by…eventually the incessant thoughts will stop coming, and you will be peering at a blank screen…

This is also like daydreaming-- giving your mind permission to relax and take a break. It takes time to cultivate the ability to get into this state, but the more you practice, the quicker you can arrive there at each attempt.

4. All intuitive ability is not the same…as mentioned above, we all are gifted with this ability, but how we perceive it is not the same in everyone. For some it will be like watching a TV screen with clear images, for others it may be more like a quick running slide show, others may experience it as if they are listening to a radio, and still others, it may affect them as a feeling. One way is not better than the other. These modes of expression may vary at times. The best thing to do is to learn to trust the intuitive information as it comes in. Sometimes the understanding is known immediately, but at other times it will become apparent at a later date.

Here is an example of a time just recently that I received an intuitive message…

I had just finished my morning walk at the park, got into my van, looked at my bottle of water, then thought oh I’ll drink it later! I drove about 1 minute away to the grocery store located right next the park where I had just been. As I approached the store, an elderly couple was exiting. The wife said to the husband “If you wait until you are thirsty to drink, then its too late.” I mentally thanked the woman for the message, did my shopping, then drank the bottle of water as soon as I got back into the car.

Do I believe this was a coincidence? Most certainly! But I view a coincidence as something that is meant to happen, not a random event. This was an intuitive message for me, sent through this couple as a reminder of something I was working on to increase (my water consumption)

These messages can come to us in any number of ways: through the words of a song, a billboard message, an overheard conversation, a magazine ad, etc. The trick is to be open to receive them…by fine tuning our awareness..

So maybe during the next few weeks, you can work on fine-tuning your awareness….you just might be surprised at what you are learning!




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